"Books that stayed" is (hopefully) a series of brief notes about books, short stories, and novellas that "put a dent", that I think about often and a few that I re-read once in a while. This is the first instalment.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John le Carré
I picked this from a paper-mart that also sold some used paperbacks. I must have been sixteen. My world till then was a few stray Sidney Sheldons, a couple of James Bond movies and maybe a couple other espionage-themed novellas. None of which could compare to this one. But I didn't know yet. When I started The Spy..., I got to about three or five pages in and then tossed it away. It was nothing like what I had read so far, the story just began smack in the middle of somewhere in the plot, I couldn't make sense of the meandering sentences, and what the heck is "Leamas" as a name, by the way?
I dont remember what made me pick the book up again many months later. Complete boredom? Lack of money to buy another book? In case there was some money, lethargy to go out and make the purchase? I dont know. But I started reading it and this time finished it. It reset all standards of "great writing" for me and le Carré has remained my most-favourite author ever since. I've read more le Carré since then and many of them are textbook masterpieces of espionage fiction but in a style that is inimitably unique to John le Carré.
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
My brother recommended this in one of our many, essay-length email exchanges. Writing in first-person is a copout and tricky at the same time. But if any short story needs a first-person narrative, it's this one. (I'm almost tempted to add Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life but I will resist that temptation.)
Flowers makes you weep for the protagonist. The creative genius of it is that the words and the writing that hit hard would be in very broken English. No more spoilers.
Anthem, Ayn Rand
Outside literary circles, Ayn Rand's other writing (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) is oft-mentioned and Anthem is not. Ironically, a communist (who I suspect secretly nursed fonder memories of Soviet Russia) introduced me to Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and then one thing led to another to end up in Anthem.
It packs a punch. Like some of her other works, the narrative is neck-deep in her preoccupation with the tyranny of communist collectivism and the only antidote to that — the individual. Like Flowers for Algernon, a crafty literary style is employed as part of the narration.
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Paul Reps
I have been unable to recollect how this book came into my possession. But it is the "one book" in my world. It is said that Vivekananda, in his mendicant days roaming around India, carried with him two books —Bhagavad Gita, and Imitation of Christ. Not exactly inspired by that (because I am not a mendicant, nor am I touring my country as one), but if there's one book I always carry and occasionally re-read on all my travels, it is this.
Zen Flesh... is lots of Buddhist stories, lots of koans and one religious text. One could meditate on the text for years and still find novelty all over the place. I am not sure if someone new to the Zen school of Buddhist thought would find this useful.
A Book of Simple Living, Ruskin Bond
In an earlier post about this: "...is not a self-help book but a rather beautiful, often poetic and mostly pagan work of words. Words that slow down time and expand space so immensely that there’s this inexplicable feeling that everything is alright." and I think that's enough said.